I don't often enter competitions but this morning I sent off 12 tokens in a bid to win a flat purportedly worth £500,000. Quite why said flat is worth so much I don't know, since it doesn't appear to have much going for it. For a start, it isn't built yet, so if I do win it I won't be able to move in until September 2006. Secondly, it's only one bedroom, and spending half a million on a single bedroom seems a bit daft when for the same amount of money you could have this which has three bedrooms and looks like one of those houses I thought only existed covered in snow in Disney films set in London. Or indeed I could have the same in Primrose Hill or Pimlico, or some other sophisticated part of almost-central London that begins with P.

But no, apparently some people would rather spend that money to live in an open-plan (read "one-room") flat within a building that looks like something out of The Jetsons, offering panoramic views (read "quite a way up a towerblock") over London, whose annual ground rent and service charges etc add up to approximately my current rent. Oh, and it's in Battersea, an area which the Standard inexplicably describes as having "excellent transport links". All this could be mine for just 12 tokens, (and £3.60's worth of copies of the Standard), £4000 a year extra fees, a year's wait and the promise to sell my soul to a franchise of the Daily Mail for "publicity purposes".

That said, if I could flog it to someone who hasn't yet spotted the flaws in the above, maybe that chocolate-box red-doored Disney terrace wouldn't be so far out of my reach after all. Ooh, I hope I win...